Ernest Henry Clark Oliphant (14 August 1862 – 20 April 1936), commonly referred to as E. H. Oliphant or Professor Oliphant, was an Australian journalist, an authority on Elizabethan literature, a popular public speaker and occasional playwright. Life Oliphant was the son of Felix Edwin Oliphant (c. 1908 – 19 February 1888) and Mary Bullers Oliphant, née Frost (died 28 March 1894) His father gave his occupation as "gentleman", and apart from involvement in a few causes associated with aid to immigrants, nothing has been found of his activities, and from the obituaries it would appear Oliphant was closer to his mother. He was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne and the University of Melbourne, but did not graduate. He was employed 1884–1888 as a librarian assistant at the Melbourne Public Library, after which he left for Europe. In 1890 he published in London The Mesmerist: a novel and three papers on the works of Beaumont and Fletcher in Englische Studien, Leipzig between 1890 and 1892, later reprinted in pamphlet form. Oliphant returned to Melbourne in 1893 and settled in Korumburra, Victoria, where he became editor and proprietor of the Korumburra Times and in 1895 party to a well-publicised slanging match with his opposite number at the Southern Mail in the same town. In 1895 he published, anonymously, a volume of verse, Lyrics, Religious and Irreligious. His name appeared as publisher however, and he afterwards acknowledged to Percival Serle that he was its author. The following year he was offered a position with the Bendigo Advertiser, as town's Argus mining correspondent. In 1898 he joined the staff of Critchley Parker's Australian Mining Standard, helping produce the booklet Victoria, Its Mines and Minerals. In 1899 he left for Queenstown, Tasmania as editor of the Mount Lyell Standard, then returned to Melbourne in 1902. While in Tasmania he discovered a reef of high-quality asbestos at Lynchford/ He was Sydney editor of Parker's Australian Mining Standard from 1903 to 1906, when he left for London to take up editorship of Parker's Money Market Review. The 50th anniversary of that paper coincided with the centenary of Argentina's independence, so he celebrated both with a special issue, noting how that country was going through a boom period. While in England he wrote a series of papers on "Shakespeare's Plays: an Examination" which appeared in the July 1908 and January and April 1909 issues of the Modern